I just heard, for the first time yesterday, that my local flagship, the University of Maryland, is going to begin charging more tuition for certain majors, including engineering and business. Apparently other institutions already do this. This is news to me. I was aware that some schools charge different amounts for different dorms.
What kind of stratification is this likely to cause?
Will financial aid vary by major or not?
Some courses are more costly due to labs, higher faculty pay due to industry competition, etc… But the different prices may be more based on student demand and willingness to pay more for the popular major.
Good question. And what do you pay if you double major?
Canadian university is already doing this.
The University of Michigan has been doing this for quite a while - different tuition/fees for almost every school (and among majors) within the university. Looks like engineering and business schools are the most expensive.
UT-Austin has done this for awhile, also.
Many colleges factor demand and cost into the equation when setting tuition and fee prices. Penn State charges more for engineering and nursing, among others. Many colleges charge extra for nursing. UVa charges $5,000 more a year for business, and several thousand a year more for engineering and nursing. UVa just announced they are adding a differential for undergrad public policy majors (a booming demand has recently arisen for those seats).
Sometimes existing students are grandfathered from having to pay new fees, or the fees are phased in. For example, UVa’s increases were phased in over a few years.
If you are eligible for financial aid at a college that truly meets 100% of need, then your aid would increase with the added fees. However, at a U. that does not meet full need or that only meets need for in-state students, you have to find some other way to come up with the money.
In a perfect world, the colleges would then also cut the prices for majors with little income potential or that have low costs. I can remember 30 years ago, grad social work majors were asking for a tuition reduction at one university.
Universities in the UK, Canada, and Japan have been doing this forever.
And unlike the slight tuition differentials (when they are there) in the US, in those countries, some majors (like engineering) could cost 2-3 times what a humanities major costs.
There are all sorts of cross-subsidies going on at a university, but one of them is definitely by non-STEM students of STEM research (not that that is a bad thing, mind you; almost everything which makes life more pleasant than 100 years is due to advances thanks to STEM research).
It shocked me a bit when I first heard about it, too, but it has been going on for years, and it makes a lot of sense. First, many of the higher-cost majors have a higher cost to educate – equipment, labs, more competition from the private sector for top-quality faculty. Second, all of them, I think, are or ought to be more financeable than other majors. Graduates with those majors have far more certain employment prospects than other graduates, and at higher compensation levels too. It might be nuts, economically, to take on $20,000 of debt for a BFA in basketweaving, but it would be even nuttier to turn your back on a BSE in computer engineering because you would have to borrow $20,000 to pay for it. (In addition to which, I have a sneaky suspicion that family income levels are higher, on average, for the more expensive majors vs. most other popular majors.) So it’s a perfect opportunity for rational price discrimination.
Think of it this way: Why should the basketweaving student, or even an English major, be subsidizing the education of a financial economics major or an orthopedic surgeon? Isn’t that a little grotesque? Or, more realistically, why should a university (and, through it, donors and taxpayers) give the same or greater subsidies to future investment bankers, stock traders, data miners as it gives to teachers and social workers?
In most cases that I have seen, the extra payment only kicks in (or only really ratchets up) for the last two years, so you don’t have lots of people paying for majors they will never complete.
At CU/Boulder, in-state tuition in the undergrad business and engineering schools is 50% higher than for arts/sciences.
It is a way to keep some in-state tuition hikes on the political down low. The tuition rates at the regular college are usually what usually gets talked about and reported in the press. It is also a way to discourage in-staters from taking up available seats in the majors that are most popular. Seats that can be sold more profitably to out-of-state students.
FYI, there’s only a 9% upcharge for OOS tuition for those two schools. 49% OOS enrollment at CU.
@northwesty, at CU, the in-state rate for business and engineering is still only a few thousand a year more than the base rate.
Also, CU is one of those state schools where funding from the legislature is enough to cover only a single-digit percentage of the school’s budget now. When a state is barely funding a school, why should a school give much preference or discount to people of that state?
The main reason for this price differential with tuition, usually in the business and engineering fields, are that universities have to pay the faculty in those majors a higher salary to attract them to want to work in academia… They can both make a lot more in the private sector than they can in university teaching. My son went to CU in the School of Engineering, and his tuition was the second most expensive on campus. Business was the highest.
We paid a premium for engineering for our sons at both UVa and Virginia Tech. This kind of thing has been going on for awhile, at lots of schools.
This is nothing new and nothing unusual. One obvious reason is the different cost for different major, even they also collect fees for specific lab classes. Imagine a 3 credit class in literature and a 3 credit class in engineering, the latter is likely use a lot more resources. At UMich, the engineering and business school are the most expensive ones. Their tuition rates are around 10-15% higher than LSA for in state students. The financial aids are adjusted accordingly as they meet the needs of in state students.
A good start would to discount the classes taught by quasi-educators and charge more (and compensate more) the real teachers who are dedicated to teaching undergraduates. A real “a la carte” model where students could build a curriculum based on their choice of instruction. Paying the same for a lecture where the “star” shows up for a bit in front of several hundred students, never talks to them, and delegates every part of the teaching to lab rats and indentured servants in sessions is a disgrace.
But then, very little if anything in the academic world is centered around the students; it’s all about maximizing revenues and offering the fewer real education hours possible to ensure the leisure-filled life of academic divas.
One can argue that a state government wants more people to go to college and take all of these kinds of jobs in state to contribute to the state’s economy and tax base. Indeed, state universities’ relatively greater emphasis on subjects like engineering, teaching, agriculture and natural resources, business, etc. comes from such economic motivations on the part of the state governments.
Also, it is not necessarily easy to distinguish, from a policy and rules standpoint, whether a math major is aiming for a quantitative finance job or a high school math teacher job. Or whether the biology major is aiming for medical school and an eventual orthopedic surgery career or a high school biology teacher.
Accounting for costs can be tricky, but at least some estimates suggest that the conventional wisdom about the cost of different majors may be incorrect:
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/146569/17/Finance%20and%20Operations%20Committee%20-%20Fully%20Allocated%20Cost%20of%20Mission%20Activities%20Part%20II.pdf [see page 19 of PDF]
The cost of full year equivalent by division at UMN Twin Cities (majors in each division are listed at http://twin-cities.umn.edu/academics?submit=Search#programs-table-undergraduate ) :
$9,625 College of Education and Human Development
$10,721 College of Science and Engineering (does not include biology)
$11,144 College of Liberal Arts (does not include math or science)
$12,259 Continuing Education
$13,307 College of Food, Agricultural, Natural Resource Sciences
$13,464 School of Nursing
$14,294 College of Biological Sciences
$16,049 Carlson School of Management (business)
$16,496 College of Design (architecture, graphic design, interior design, etc.)
Other campuses:
$11,046 Duluth
$11,446 Crookston
$16,273 Morris (LAC)
The biggest surprise appears to be the low cost of the College of Science and Engineering, where labs and having to compete with industry for faculty would make one think that it would be expensive.
@ucbalumnus, maybe science and engineering bring in enough research dollars to make the funding by the school small?
Hmm…I would assume the opposite. I think kids who come from lower middle income families are much more likely to major in vocational majors like business, engineering or nursing than kids from higher income families. I also read “Paying for the Party” which talks about the “soft” majors wealthier OOS students pursue…many of which are “business lite.”
At a lot of schools, graduate students in STEM fields receive higher stipends than those in the humanities and social sciences. If your education model uses a lot of grad students to lead labs, sections, etc., that would be another reason these fields cost more.